A child who was treated morally in all the right ways, but who went unloved, is a child who would not, and could not, come to value herself or himself properly.  Nothing more fully bestows a sense of worth upon a new-born child than parental love.  As infants, we are born into this world without a sense of self and so without a sense of value.  And it is parental love, and nothing else, that at the outset makes it possible for us to have to have a proper sense of self.  Anything else will invariably miss the mark.  It is in virtue of being the unmistakable object of manifest parental love that we come to have a positive sense of worth, that we come to value ourselves as human beings.  Indeed, in the absence of parental love, no sense of worth could easily obtain a purchase upon our lives, including moral worth.  Thus, while there is no denying that morality is an intrinsic good, it is not first among intrinsic goods.  Parental love is.

Parental love and only parental love that generates in the child what I shall call a sense of cherished uniqueness not tied to invidious comparisons.[1]  When things go as they should, the child’s conviction that she is profoundly loved by her parents does not in any way require the belief on the part of the child that she is more loved by her parents than other children are loved by their parents.  Nor does parental love engender the sentiment that the child is better than other children.  Parental love does not engender these sentiments notwithstanding the fact that parents privilege their children and not the children of others.  Thus, the very nature of parental love is that it privileges without entailing invidious comparisons. 

Significantly, it is in virtue of parental love that the child experiences being treated morally not as a duty, but as an act of love.  Although every loving parent is deeply motivated to treat her or his child in all the morally right ways, the springs of that motivation are most surely not morality itself.  Most assuredly, it is not for the sake of duty, to use Kant’s own language, that good parents do what is right by their children.  Thus, parental love challenges Kantian morality in a very deep, deep way.  For there is at least one category of the person, namely that of a child, who should be treated morally where the ultimate motivational basis for such treatment should not be morality, but love itself.  To the child’s question, “Why do you love me so,” there is simply no satisfactory way to complete the answer with “It was my moral duty to do so”.  Again, the majestic power of parental love lies in its giving rise to a sense of cherished uniqueness in the child without invidious comparison.

I remarked above that parents privilege their children.  Morality, by contrast, does not privilege one person over the other.  That is from the standpoint of morality, we all stand as equals vis à vis one another.  Morality, by its very nature, is not person-specific.  Everyone should be treated properly.  Not just tall people or people who do not need to wear eyeglasses or wealthy people.  Not just so-and-so next door or up the street or across town.  Even unjust people should be treated properly. 

Morality is about how any and everyone should be treated in the relevant circumstances.  Accordingly, if a given feature makes a difference for one person, then morality requires that this very same feature make a difference for all other persons similarly situated.  For example, if being near death owing to starvation morally excuses Rachel’s act of stealing a bit of food in order to stay alive, then this consideration morally excuses everyone so situated from so behaving.  Indeed, morality cannot privilege a person as such, but only the particularities of a person’s circumstances.  Thus, insofar as Rachel is justified in stealing, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she is Rachel, but with the fact that she is near death owing to starvation. 

Recall Thomas Nagel’s remarkable essay, The Possibility of Altruism.[2] He reminds us that according to the moral point of view, each person counts for no more than one among others.  The egoist, Nagel observes, wants to count for more than one among others.  That is, she wants to hold that her concerns are more important than the concerns of others because and only because the concerns are hers.  Nagel argues that a person is guilty of conceptual confusion if she thinks that her concerns count for more than the concerns of others just because they are his concerns.  A person cannot have any rational grounds for thinking this.  Each person counts, but no more than any other person.  Hence, as a purely structural matter cherished uniqueness has no place in the moral point of view.  Indeed, a conception of morality that embodied the view that cherished uniqueness holds for some individuals would not on Nagel’s account be a conception of morality at all.

The preceding remarks might shed some light on the universal appeal of becoming a parent.  For parenting allows for the very real hope of doing something morally majestic whatever one’s station in life might be, just so long as the bond between parent and child remains stable and wholesome.  The poor or uneducated person can have this hope as much as the wealthy or the scholarly.  Indeed, even if we take it as a given that God exists, it remains true nonetheless that not even God’s love, nor therefore God’s law, can be a substitute for parental love.  If there are any sublime truths in this world, this is surely one of them.  Alas, this is also a reason why parenting should be taken so seriously.  For as Sigmund Freud observed in his work Civilization and Its Discontents (albeit with a different aim in mind): Insofar as human beings have the opportunity to approach being God-like, there is no gainsaying the truth that parenting is it ! ! ! 

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These remarks are an except from chapter 1, entitled “Uniquely Valued,” of my forthcoming book The Family and the Political Self (Cambridge University Press, December 2005).  In my first book, Living Morally (Temple University Press, 1989) I referred to parental love as transparent, because parents are disposed to love their children regardless of the intellectual and physical features that their children possess.